In <02a54597$0$20629$c3e8...@news.astraweb.com> Steven D'Aprano <st...@remove-this-cybersource.com.au> writes:
>On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 10:57:32 +0000, kj wrote: >> Recursion! One of the central concepts in the theory of >> functions! This is shown most clearly by the following elaboration of >> my original example: >> >> class Demo(object): >> def fact_rec(n): >> if n < 2: >> return 1 >> else: >> return n * fact_rec(n - 1) >Why are you defining a method without a self parameter? Because, as I've explained elsewhere, it is not a method: it's a "helper" function, meant to be called only once, within the class statement itself. Well, this is not strictly true, because the function is recursive, so it will also call itself a few times. But still, all these calls happen (loosely speaking) "within the class statement". In fact the only reason to use a function for such initialization work is when one needs recursion; otherwise there's no point in defining a function that will only be invoked exactly once. kynn -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
